In the towns that ring the Bakken, the café is where the boom is taken in — the riggers, the ranchers and the truckers all crowding the same counter over coffee and the price of crude.

When the rigs came faster than the roofs, workers slept in truck cabs and hastily built lodges, and the oil counties scrambled to house a population that doubled almost overnight.

When the pipelines fill, the Bakken's crude rides the rails, and mile-long trains of black tank cars have become a familiar sight rolling east and west across the plains.

Moving Bakken oil to market means pipe across the prairie, and every proposed line reopens the hard negotiation among landowners, tribes, companies and the wider public.

Between its coal, its wind and its oil, North Dakota produces far more energy than it consumes, and the surplus flows out across the region on wire, pipe and rail.

For want of pipelines to carry it, much of the natural gas that rises with Bakken oil is burned at the wellhead, and the flares turn the western prairie night into a field of small suns.